The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (53 page)

At the Louvre, where Trochu established his headquarters, windows were covered with sandbags. Paintings and statuary had been boxed up and carried away for safekeeping. In the great galleries, instead of painters quietly at work at their easels making copies, one saw and heard gunsmiths at workbenches noisily converting old muskets into breechloaders.

In a city cut off from all news from the outside, there were more newspapers being published than ever—thirty-six or more—and representing every shade of political opinion. Hungry for news of almost any kind, Parisians now read newspapers as they walked down the streets. Yet at the same time there seemed even less faith that much of anything published could be trusted for accuracy.

At first all theaters were closed, but when the Comédie Française reopened, with productions using no sets or costumes, a few others followed. Restaurants and cafés remained open, but only until ten at night. Supplies of bread were still plentiful and cheap, but not meat. Reportedly 50,000 horses or more were to be slaughtered before long. Horse-drawn cabs and carriages were growing noticeably fewer in number. But dining on cats and dogs was as yet spoken of only in jest.

Paris continued taking things in stride. Little if any outspoken complaining was to be heard. The crime rate dropped significantly.

For the American population, though they were but a tiny fraction of the total, the hard truth of their lot was little different from the rest. “The situation here is dreadful,” wrote Washburne, summing things up on November 12. “The Prussians can’t get into Paris and the French can’t get out.” Nor did it help that the weather had turned damp and raw. “Nothing of interest today,” he recorded on November 22. “Raining outside—cold, cheerless, dreary …” When he took time off to sit for a portrait, the photographer told him his expression was “too sober.”

“Oh, for an opportunity to escape!” wrote Nathan Sheppard, who to fill the time walked the city at all hours. “One felt an intense desire to have one’s capacity for hearing, seeing, and comprehending increased
a hundredfold, to be enabled to be everywhere at once, and to miss not one phase of the situation.” He was annoyed only by the “furtive glances” he encountered, the suspicion of any and all “
étrangers
” as spies. On the Champs-Élysées one evening, he and two other Americans were arrested on the charge of talking in a foreign tongue.

Worst of all, he wrote, was the mental strain, the
ennui
:

It is the intolerable tension of expectation and the baffling uncertainty that besets every hour and minute of the day which tries us. One really knows nothing of what is going on, and there is an all-pervading sense of something that is going to happen, and which may come at any moment. This gives a sense of unreality to one’s whole life.

Anything more dreary than the boulevards in the evening would be difficult to imagine, wrote London’s
Daily News
correspondent Labouchère. Only one streetlamp in three was lighted, and the cafés were on half-allowances of gas.

For many not the least of troubles was severe insomnia. An American physician from Pennsylvania named Robert Sibbet, who had come to Paris expecting to attend lectures at the École de Médecine just as the École closed its doors in the emergency, found himself “overtaken” with insomnia and reported many others suffering in the same way. The worst of it was the cannonading. “The cannonading produces a decided effect upon nervous constitutions.” Many nights he could not sleep at all, not even for an hour.

The American medical student Mary Putnam had the advantage, she said, of something to do of overriding importance to her. She concentrated on her academic work, and on tending the sick and wounded at the Hôpital de la Pitié. The steadily diminishing supply of food, the inconveniences, bothered her comparatively little. Nor had she any desire to leave.

She was staying with a French family whose congenial, cultivated company and outlook she greatly enjoyed. Her only pain she seems to have kept to herself. She had fallen in love with another medical student, a young Frenchman, and they had become engaged. But he had gone to
the front to serve. She refused to brood or complain. She had set herself to completing her thesis by the end of the year. Her chosen topic was “
De la Graisse Neutre et des Acides Gras
” (“Natural Fat and Fatty Acids”). It was the last hurdle to her becoming the first American woman to be graduated from the École de Médecine.

“It is not at all probable that the war will last until December,” she had written to her mother on the eve of the siege, “and if school opens then I have all I need.” She had offered her services to the doctors at the American Ambulance, but was told they had more volunteers than they had places for.

With the passage of days the toll of disease—and especially of smallpox—mounted steadily. In the first week of the siege 158 people died of smallpox. By the fourth week the number exceeded 200. By the eighth week, 419 would die of the disease.

After nearly two months of siege, the gas that made Paris the City of Light finally gave out, along with food and firewood. An order appeared that instead of only one in three streetlamps lighted at night, it would now be one in six.

As darkness fell earlier and more heavily, Washburne found himself thinking increasingly of life at home in Galena and such examples of fortitude as he had grown up with in the Maine of his boyhood. On November 18 he noted in his diary that it was his father’s eighty-sixth birthday, and that it would not be long before his father and the last of the settlers of Livermore were all gone.

And what a class of men they were [he wrote], distinguished for intelligence, nobility, honor, thrift, illustrating their lives by all these virtues which belong to the best type of the New England character. … And here in this far off, besieged city, in these long and dismal days, I think of them all. …

To Parisians it came as no surprise that they would still, in the face of everything and in large numbers, turn out for a Sunday stroll on the boulevards, quite as though they had not a care, and especially if the sun were shining, as it was on Sunday, November 20. “The sun was just warm
enough for comfort,” Nathan Sheppard noted. “The atmosphere was kindly.” He saw nothing dejected in the look of the crowd. “On the contrary, nothing could be more indicative of the satisfaction and contentment than the faces of the people under the genial November sun. They were each and every one the picture of self-congratulation.” Shoes were polished, children “sportive.” At one of the public concerts, a young lady who had performed beamed when she received, instead of a bouquet of flowers, a generous portion of cheese.

In the meantime, the cattle and sheep that had filled the Bois de Boulogne were to be seen no more. Horsemeat had become the mainstay of Paris. And all knew there was worse to come. “They are arriving down to what we call in the Galena mines the
hard pan
,” Washburne wrote, referring to the part all but impossible to drill.

Because the German command continued to grant him the privilege of receiving by diplomatic pouch news from the outside world, he was in a position like that of no one else. No newspapers from elsewhere got into Paris except those that came to the American Legation. But he could also send out written correspondence and so felt he must report what he knew as responsibly and accurately as possible. When time allowed, he tried to get out and see all he could of what was happening, hoping in this way that he might be better able to forecast what was to come. But could anyone predict how Paris would respond under such circumstances? There seemed no telling with the French. So much that they did seemed such a contradiction. “With an improvised city government, without police, without organization,” he recorded in the last week of November, “Paris has never been so tranquil and never has there been so little crime. …”

The radical political clubs had begun to “agitate” again. “Hunger and cold will do their work,” he wrote. But whatever the given situation, he reported to Washington, no one could tell how soon it might all change.

The American Ambulance, the large, well-equipped field hospital established by Thomas Evans and others at the start of the war, had proven a tremendous success and a source of pride for every American who knew anything about it. At its head were two American physicians, Dr. John
Swinburne, the chief surgeon, and Dr. W. E. Johnston, the physician-in-chief, assisted by several additional American doctors and nearly forty American volunteers, including Gratiot Washburne.

Of the many hospitals and ambulances throughout the city, it was the only tent encampment, intended specifically to provide as much fresh air as possible. “Here were order, system, and discipline,” wrote Wickham Hoffman. The work went on without stop in all weather.

To warm the large tents in cold weather a trench had been dug the length of each on the inside and a pipe laid to carry heat from a coal stove set in a hole at one end of the tent on the outside. Thus the ground was dried and warmed, and this warmed the whole tent. It was a solution devised during the Civil War and it worked perfectly. No patient in the American Ambulance was to suffer from the cold. “I have known the thermometer outside to be 20 degrees Fahrenheit, while in the tents it stood at 55 degrees,” wrote Hoffman.

Swinburne, a battlefield surgeon in the Civil War, had been traveling in France when the Franco-Prussian War broke out and had stayed in Paris to serve. He spoke perfect French, seemed never to sleep, and was admired by everybody. He and Dr. Johnston both served without remuneration.

“Is it necessary that we should dwell upon the scrupulous cleanliness of this ambulance, or the assiduous care [with] which our wounded are treated?” asked an editorial in the
Électeur Libre
, adding that it was “truly touching” to see these foreigners “giving themselves up without reserve to this humane work.” The surgeon general of the French Army told Elihu Washburne he thought the American hospital superior to anything the French had.

On December 1, following yet another futile French assault launched on the German lines, Washburne stood in the cold of the afternoon watching as the wounded, numbering more than a hundred, were hauled to the tents of the ambulance by the carriage load. Gratiot had been with the volunteers who went to the battlefield to help. One soldier had died in Gratiot’s arms.

The cold of winter had arrived, and Washburne continued to chronicle in his diary the steady worsening of conditions and decline of hope. Numbering
the days of the siege, he filled page after page, writing in a clear, straightforward hand, leaving little margin on either side and rarely ever crossing out or changing a word.

December 2. 76th day of the siege. Cold … ice made last night half an inch thick.

December 3. 77th day of the siege. … There has been no fighting at all anywhere today. There was a very light snow last night and this evening it rains a little. The suffering of the troops on both sides must have been fearful these last days. The French are without blankets and with but little to eat, half-frozen, half-starved, and raw troops at that. … I have just come from the American Ambulance where I saw a poor captain of the regular army breathing his last and his last moments were being soothed by some of our American ladies who are devoting themselves to the sick and dying.

December 4. 78th day of the siege. A snapping cold morning. … Have remained in my room nearly all day hugging my fire closely. This evening went to Mr. Moulton’s with Gratiot as usual … on Sunday evening. Nothing talked of or thought of but the … siege and the absent ones and our “bright and happy homes so far away. …”

December 6. 80th day of the siege. … Another sortie threatened which only means more butchery. The more we hear of the battles of last week, the more bloody they seem to have been. The French have lost most frightfully and particularly in officers. They have shown a courage bordering on desperation.

December 8. 82nd day of the siege. … A more doleful day than this has not yet been invented. …

December 11. 85th day of the siege. My cold worse than ever and I am unable to go out. … People come in and say the day is horrible outside. For the first time there is [talk] about the supply of bread getting short. …

December 15. 89th day of the siege. … Went to the Legation this
P.M
. at two o’clock. The ante room was filled with poor German women asking aid. I am now giving succor to more than six hundred women and children. …

As he explained in a letter to one of his brothers at home, money for support of the refugees on his hands came from the German government, but the time was fast approaching when money would buy neither food nor firewood.